Production server requirements? (10k concurrent users)

Concurrent users will be more of a traffic issue than anything on its own. If that is 10K concurrent readers you get one thing, if you are looking at 10K concurrent posters then MongoDB is going to be struggling on any platform.

Do you have an existing site to compare this data from? How did you come up with 10K concurrent? To give perspective, http://mangolassi.it/ is an extremely busy forum, we are told we are the busiest in our industry (IT) and concurrent rarely tops 80. Not 80K... 80. That's with thousands of daily users, nearly a thousand daily posts, etc. You are looking at more than 100 times our peak, let alone our load. Doable, but huge.

The question is about spikes in traffic. I need generalized data for scaling projections, cost estimates and hardware decisions. The correctly sized server for each process will act as a base for scaling to the required demand. It is not uncommon to reach ten's of thousands of uniques when facebook is involved.

If 10k concurrent were constant, i'd hire someone from outside the team.

Well in my eyes there are several factors I would consider.
Do you ONLY want to run NodeBB or are there other applications running on the server as for example WordPress, which requires PHP or is the server dedicated for NodeJS?

Do you use SSL encryption?

Whats your webserver (NGINX would be perfect for this)?

How fast is your connection (mainly important for an end-user)?

So basically it is important what you actually want to do. If its about simply running and serving NodeBB to 10K connections it is not so hard, but if you want to run several tasks at once on as few servers as possible things are slightly different.

Edit:
This is what I would do, when I would be have to serve the same amount of traffic as you do. I assume you are going to use SSL and will also run a dynamic PHP application with NodeJS.

Additionally I will not consider the fact, that you maybe want your site to be served world wide.

According to my experience it is worth the try and many big sites see that similar, if we can trust the SSDB site.

Why shall we use MariaDB?
Well, I guess this is almost self explaining.
I would recommend to cache as much as possible of the database and also use a disk-controller with a write cache (see more at the setup).

What webserver is the best?
For high traffic purposes NGINX is definitely the best, you can get for free.
If you want to use SSL I would even go for NGINX 1.9.6 with HTTP/2 support, but thats everything else than mandatory and is just an option.
Otherwise we can make use of NGINX 1.8.0 (current stable release) , PageSpeed, IPv6 and HHVM.

The setups
As a matter of fact, high I/O and a big RAM are definitely the most important things for databases.

SSDB:

32GB DDR4 RAM

Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3 (slightly slower than a 1650, but less TDP)

400GB NVMe SSD (Intel 750)*

Sockel 2011-3 Mainboard

500-700W PSU

Linux

Cost: ca. 1500€-2000€ (ca. 1750-2200$)

MariaDB:

64GB DDR4 RAM

Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3 (slightly slower than a 1650, but less TDP)

128GB RAID 10 SSD*

Sockel 2011-3 Mainboard

500-700W PSU

Linux

Cost: ca. 1500€-2000€ (ca. 1750-2200$)

Notice:
You can again use a NVMe SSD, but if there are no bigger R/W processes, it would be a waste. An example for that would be a simple cooperation website built with a CMS.
With an additional plugin you can even generate static sites, which no longer require SQL to be served.

Well in my eyes there are several factors I would consider.
Do you ONLY want to run NodeBB or are there other applications running on the server as for example WordPress, which requires PHP or is the server dedicated for NodeJS?

Do you use SSL encryption?

Whats your webserver (NGINX would be perfect for this)?

How fast is your connection (mainly important for an end-user)?

So basically it is important what you actually want to do. If its about simply running and serving NodeBB to 10K connections it is not so hard, but if you want to run several tasks at once on as few servers as possible things are slightly different.

PHP only for the cart software. All NodeBB + webRTC signal server

Only Partial SSL; for cart

Yes; NGINX

Connection would be determined by AWS/GCE

I am looking to architect the hardware footprint as a scaling collection of minimally sized servers so that during lulls in traffic the costs drop to the core Reserved Instances.

Although some content will be created and stored locally, the vast majority of the content will be embedded links to other sites. It is almost all just http traffic; NodeBB, chat, etc. Even the local content is being largely offloaded with Peer5 and the chat with webRTC. Minimalism.

Well in my eyes there are several factors I would consider.
Do you ONLY want to run NodeBB or are there other applications running on the server as for example WordPress, which requires PHP or is the server dedicated for NodeJS?

Do you use SSL encryption?

Whats your webserver (NGINX would be perfect for this)?

How fast is your connection (mainly important for an end-user)?

So basically it is important what you actually want to do. If its about simply running and serving NodeBB to 10K connections it is not so hard, but if you want to run several tasks at once on as few servers as possible things are slightly different.

PHP only for the cart software. All NodeBB + webRTC signal server

Only Partial SSL; for cart

Yes; NGINX

Connection would be determined by AWS/GCE

I am looking to architect the hardware footprint as a scaling collection of minimally sized servers so that during lulls in traffic the costs drop to the core Reserved Instances.

Although some content will be created and stored locally, the vast majority of the content will be embedded links to other sites. It is almost all just http traffic; NodeBB, chat, etc. Even the local content is being largely offloaded with Peer5 and the chat with webRTC. Minimalism.

Before proceding with AWS or GCE, I would like to know where you are located.
You could use OVH. Their prices are pretty low, they have DC's in Canada and France and even the right servers for this project, except NVMe SSD's, if I am not mistaken.

So maybe also tell us your budget. There are definitely cheaper providers than AWS and GCE, offering the same reliability and performance.

Edit:
Be careful about SSDB. It definitely is better than Redis, but NodeBB does not fully supports it, yet. As an appropriate connector is missing.
Therefore you still have to stick to Redis for now - an import to SSDB should be possible at any time though.

I live in North america and the target audience is similarly located. Only one AZ is truly needed.

I would prefer mostly upfront capex, rather than ongoing opex. A combination of Reserved Instances for the core and Spot/Preemptable instances for the autoscaling would be ideal. The initial core of the servers would be relatively cheap reserved instances on three years term. The scaling costs are intended to be amortized on-the-fly as demand increases with ad revenue and internal sources.

App engine doesn't look well suited for node.js, though they have workarounds.

Go with Compute Engine though, but in the end I always can say one thing:
Testing, testing, testing. Otherwise you won't be able to have a comparison and so improve your backend, just like skills overall.

Use custom css in the admin appearance tab like this, using the actual category number you want to hide:
.page-category-16 [component="category/post/guest"] {
display: none;
}
Really, I feel like the Login to Post is for posting to the forum in general, not necessarily to the category being viewed.

@prog Hi there,
Sorry I did not updated this post and crossed my fingers too quickly, it worked fine until expiration of my token (not sure ??)
I opened a new topic https://community.nodebb.org/topic/6397/need-guru-s-help-unable-to-log-on-fresh-0-8-0-even-with-local-admin because I' could not log in anymore on my forum (even with local admin),
Any ideas would save my live